


The Very Error of the Moon

by beggars_visored



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Alternate Universe - Swimming, Depressed Harry, Fluff and Angst, Gay Male Character, Jock Louis, Love/Hate, M/M, Multi, Nerd Harry, Ocean, One Shot, Swimming, Swimming Boys, basically i wrote this while listening to ambient music
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-07
Updated: 2013-12-07
Packaged: 2018-01-03 21:21:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,774
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1073187
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beggars_visored/pseuds/beggars_visored
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"It is the very error of the moon;<br/>She comes more near the earth than she was wont;<br/>And makes men mad."</p><p>-Othello, Act V Scene II</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Very Error of the Moon

Harry feels like he’s going to throw up. It’s only Monday and already the halls have been decorated with signs touting the swim team’s latest match. There are bright blue and gold streamers dangling from every possible doorway, and teachers have put pictures from the paper of the swimmers winning every event in their last match against the private school around town.

It doesn’t make him sick to see them do well, that’s not it. He wishes he could swim. Maybe things would be easier if he could swim.

But he can’t, and it’s whatever, so he just has to suck it up and deal. But it makes him sick because he has to keep seeing _his_ face everywhere he goes, all plastered on every wall, that stupid little boy with his stupid little life and all of his stupid tiny speedos. So it makes him ill.

He can part the waters in the pool, and he parts them in the hallways as well. People see him walk down the center and they just form, like schools of minnows, blending into the lockers, the walls, where they belong. He has his arm hooked in hers and he’s beaming at everybody because he knows all of them for some ridiculous reason Harry can’t figure out yet, and he’s gliding, swimming, effortlessly, breaststroke, breathe.

“Go Louis!” someone shouts and the whole hallway, the whole school, the town, the world erupt into cheers. Louis just looks at his shoes, pulling Eleanor tighter to him, modestly blushing at the literal roar of approbation. People are ebbing in and out, like the tides pulled by gravity, washing up on him and back, in and back and Harry just can’t breathe and he feels like he’s being tossed around, even more so than any other day, and manages to heave himself into the bathroom just before losing his breakfast into the sink on the far wall.

After he’s done retching, he stands up slowly and looks at himself in the mirror. His face is pale, ashen as always. His thick black curls are hanging loosely all over the place, dangling half in his eyes and half into who-knows-where, some nether region where he’d like to disappear. He rinses his mouth out to get that horrible taste away, and just leans his head against the cold porcelain for a minute until the world slows down and he catches his breath.

“You okay, mate?” Harry turns around, startled to hear someone paying attention to him.

“Oh, it’s you,” he mumbles, seeing a concerned Niall peering in from behind the door. Niall scoffs and shuts the bathroom door behind him. “Who’d you think it have been?” Harry doesn’t have a good answer for that, because it wouldn’t have been anyone else, it never is, and so he just doesn’t say anything.

Niall’s been his best friend for as long as he can remember. From the first day of kindergarten when Harry went over and told him his hair looked like the lemonade he used to drink when he’d have strawberries and whipped cream for dessert and Niall told him his hair looked like dog shit, they’d been inseparable.  He’d been the first person that Harry had talked to about his sexuality, the first real conversation they had after that one time they fooled around and Harry got off and Niall didn’t and they just sat and talked about it like it was no big deal and then when Harry said he was into guys Niall didn’t blink or say anything, just got up and made himself a waffle and came back to watch telly.

His was by far the best reaction though. When he decided to come out in ninth year, all hell broke loose. Everything was like a tsunami, people pounding him against the walls over and over again til he saw stars, emotionally, that is, but what was worse, being emotionally or physically abused? At least scars heal.

But it was the athletes, the one like Louis and that guy Zayn and his mate Liam who were always together, dominating the parties, getting invited to every party and getting slammed like it was nobody’s business because it wasn’t, that made Harry’s life a living hell. Because they didn’t torment him, or push him, or call him names. They just acted like he didn’t exist. He’d been friendly with them before, said hi or had the occasional small talk. Now he was invisible, a part of the scenery, the wallflower that nobody paid any attention to because he meant nothing to them and therefore meant nothing to everyone.

Niall helps him wipe down his face and put a little bit more color into it, and then they go out of the bathroom together and go to first hour, English, Harry’s favorite class, the one he always gets the A in, even with Mr. Paul who never gives A’s on anything, Harry gets them and he gets literature and he loves it.

He wants to go to uni for it, plans to get out of this stupid small town so fast nobody will notice he’s left. Not that they noticed he was there in the first place, but you know. Still. He’s applied to Oxford, waiting to hear back, already in at Eton and Cambridge and a few others. He’s smart, wicked smart, the best writer any of his teachers have ever seen. They say he’s going to do things, be somebody. But for now, he’s still nobody.

He slips into his desk in English, takes out his dog-eared copy of _Othello_ , well-worn and covered in his scribbles, notes and doodles and underlines and questions blanketing every square inch of the margins and then some. Everyone else has these neat, limited editions that are pristine and blank, but Harry thinks his is just that much better. It’s been loved.

They turn to Act Five. Harry reads along silently while Mr. Paul reads aloud, ignoring Niall’s fervent attempts to throw folded post-it notes in his direction. His mind drifts off in a million different directions, flailing through an open sea, the horizon all around him, stretching into oblivion.

Louis saunters into class, late as always. Mr. Paul ignores it, holds his hand out for a pass, and Louis just walks right on by. Harry snorts in annoyance. Cocky bastard.

The rest of the class passes along nicely, with Harry starting a nice paper on the undertones of racial segregation and political stratification in the murder of Desdemona before Mr. Paul stops the class to make an announcement. It’s a project, group work. They have to live for a day, twenty-four hours, on Wednesday, like the person they aren’t to find themselves. He argues that Iago spends much of the play pretending to be who he isn’t, a man who is loyal to Othello and not jealous and certainly not a little tiny bit in love with him, only to find that his assumed traits become his real ones by the end.

So Harry has four days to get himself ready, and he starts thinking of ideas of what to do, when Mr. Paul adds a requirement. They have to stand in the life of someone else in the class, their polar opposite, someone who they could never ever be if things continued the way they are now.

Naturally, everyone pairs off with relative ease. Niall finds that bloke Zayn’s girlfriend, Perrie, because Niall is very quiet and muted and Perrie is loud and obnoxious and it works and Harry laughs quietly when he thinks about what that will look like. But then he realizes the only person left is Louis.

“Well, I’m not particularly good at English,” Louis says when they start talking about their plans. “And I’m not nearly as thin as you. Like, put on a couple o’ kilos or something, you’re gonna break.” Harry doesn’t laugh, even though Louis does, and he catches on quicker than Harry expected that he doesn’t find it funny so he stops and just quiets down.

“Nobody likes me,” Harry says, surprising himself a little bit and definitely taking Louis aback. “I’m not popular, I can’t do anything athletic for shit, and I’d rather hide behind a book on a Wednesday night than get shitfaced because I think it looks cool.” He’s angry, so he just goes with it. “And I can’t swim, and people don’t part like the tides for me, and I don’t have my own gravity and I’m so much better at just feeling sick or something than a part of what’s around me and I want to get the fuck out of here, not stay here and be the most popular kid in school and peak or whatever and I’m just not a fan of all of that bullshit.”

Louis stays quiet for a very long time. Harry just stands there and looks slightly past him, lost in his own thoughts. Eventually, Louis puts his hands in the pockets of his swim team jacket and just says “I think I can do that.”

But Harry knows he can’t, not really. Nobody can do it as well as he can.

At home that afternoon after school, Harry goes up to his room and stares at the ceiling for an hour. He counts the number of pores in the paint on top, drawing lines through them and making pictures in his head, like birds in the center of some colossal body of water. His life feels endless, and he hates it, he hates it so much he could cry.

Crying doesn’t solve any problems, though, so he saves it. Eventually he drifts off into sleep, pretending like he can’t hear Anne when she calls him for dinner, can’t feel her tuck him in, can’t hear her try to stop from crying over how sad her little boy is, what went wrong? what did they do? he’s a lost cause it’s over it’s over there’s nothing but water and drowning and silence.

He wakes up the next morning from a dream where he ruled the world, a monarch in a silver castle, master of the seas, the waves crashing against the rocks, and everyone seeing how great he could be. The buzz lasts until about seven, when he gets to school and find somebody has put little paper fish with good luck messages on the walls for the swim team.

Harry doesn’t talk to Louis during English that day during the ten minutes Mr. Paul gave them to prepare, he just sits and reads Act Five over again, writing new notes and outlining new passages and just generally ignoring Louis. He has to give him credit, he tries to get Harry’s attention several times but he eventually just gives up and starts sending selfies to Eleanor on his phone until Mr. Paul catches him and he’s reprimanded.

At lunch Harry struggles to keep himself from running out of the cafeteria. He’s got a tray of cold potatoes and some sort of meat thing that he can’t identify and an apple so he sits and keeps breathing and tries to focus on the apple and _Othello_ and just getting through lunch that’s it, just lunch, just lunch just lunch.

Niall taps Harry on the shoulder. Annoyed, he turns around to find Louis standing above him, hands awkwardly shoved in his swim jacket pockets. “Do you wanna come over to work on planning today?” he asks.

Harry turns back to his book and takes another bite of his apple. “Don’t you have swim practice?”

Louis shrugs and scuffs his shoe against the tiled floor. “Yeah, well, only til about seven or so. Then I’m free after that.” Harry still doesn’t look up, just casually turns the page.

“If you want to, I guess. I don’t think there’s too much to plan, but whatever.” Louis just kind of nods and then walks away. Once he’s out of earshot, Niall groans out loud and pushes Harry hard.

“Really, Haz? Louis Tomlinson is inviting you over and you can’t even look at him?”

Harry turns the page again. “No.”

Niall sighs, exasperated, as if this were the easiest thing in the world to understand. “Haz, he was your first crush you—”

“Look, I am not talking about this right now,” Harry says tersely, slamming the big volume shut and throwing his apple core angrily in the trash. “I am not talking about this now, or later, or ever.” He storms out of the cafeteria and into the bathrooms, where he spends the rest of the period sitting on the counter reading Shakespeare aloud and pretending anybody cares.

Just like always, Harry goes home and stares at the ceiling for a while. He remembers nights where he used to pretend Louis was lying there with him, like his other half, two crescent moons interlaced in something he had no name for. He had nothing to call it because it didn’t exist. It never would exist, if he were honest. And he is. So it wouldn’t. Ever.

Sometimes he wonders what would happen if you cut a compass in half. Does the moon pull you back to true north? Where is the right direction if you have half of something that can’t function when it’s not whole?

All of a sudden, Anne is knocking on his door and there’s Louis, hair wet and scraggly from all of the chlorine in the pool, and he’s wearing sweatpants and some dingy old sweater and he looks cold and out of sympathy or exhaustion Harry offers him his blanket and Louis gratefully accepts it.

“Sorry I’m late,” he says, settling into the warmth of Harry’s fleece ensemble. Harry shrugs. “Didn’t know it mattered,” he replies tersely. Louis just nods slowly.

“Thought of any other ideas?” Louis asks after a stretch of silence. Harry, on his back, just shrugs and keeps counting holes in the ceiling paint.

“You do know this is tomorrow, right?” Louis asks. Harry doesn’t move, doesn’t say anything. As per usual. See if Louis notices.

All of a sudden, Louis stands up and storms over to Harry. “Look, we have to actually talk. More like you just sit there silent as usual and I talk and you just listen to me and you do what I tell you to,” Louis snaps. “I don’t know what you have shoved up your arse but you are acting like a complete prick and you’re certainly doing an amazing job of playing the sad lonely boy who everybody hates but it’s getting really old. So you’d better grow the fuck up and stop pretending to be this miserable idiot when I know you’re not that. So, what are we doing tomorrow?”

Harry says nothing, tempts him. Toes in saltwater at the ocean, making sure the waves won’t touch.

“Why won’t you talk to me?” Louis nearly howls. “I don’t fucking get it, just talk to me!”

“Maybe it’s because it’s hilarious how uncomfortable it makes you that I’m literally the only person who treats you the same way you treat me,” Harry snaps back, sitting bolt upright. “Like I’m invisible, like I’m some nobody, and like you could fucking care less about anything I do or say or whatever because I don’t matter to you and I never will.”

“But why?” Louis asks, “What’s the point? So you act the way you think you’re being unjustly treated. Whoop-dee-doo, you win. Now what? Everybody remembers you as this self conscious, uptight asshole who couldn’t get his act together.”

Harry’s really irate now. “Well, I’m sorry that not everybody can be as perfect as you are, Louis Tomlinson. I’m terribly sorry that you’ve been given the terrible burden of humanity’s inadequacy in comparison to your other-worldly greatness.”

“Just tell me what’s the matter!” Louis screams. Harry can’t take it anymore. The water is rushing at the levee, it won’t hold anymore.

“Because I like you, okay?” he screams. Both of them fall dead silent.

The water has breached. Flooding, massive destruction. No moon to rein it in.

Louis just starts laughing. It starts as a giggle, and then turns into a laugh and then a belly laugh and Harry is so pissed off he just screams at Louis to get out of his house and he slams the door in his face even though he’s about to say something but Harry just really couldn’t give two shits at this point what Louis has to say. He’s just gone and fucked up everything.

School the next day comes with the high tide, and Harry remembers how much it’s going to suck. Louis texted him a list of suggested things after he kicked him out, and one of them with an asterisk was the swim meet. Because Harry really needed to put himself through _that_.

And even though he almost loses it during lunch when the entire cafeteria starts cheering for Louis and he’s with Eleanor and they’re waving like they’re the Duke and Dutchess of Cambridge or something he keeps himself together and manages to pull on some school colors before heading over to the swim meet.

It’s packed, and crowed, and hot as hell. It seems like everyone is there, and it’s not long before Harry has shed his sweater in favor of the tight t-shirt underneath. Everyone’s lined up at the edges, dipping their toes into the water for a test. Harry can hardly hear himself thinking.

He doesn’t understand the point of this project. Living in someone else’s life doesn’t mean shit, especially when you’re not them and you have no desire to be. So Harry just keeps quiet and blends in as per usual.

And then the whistle is blown and they’re diving in and Harry sees Louis wiggling through the water, like a fish, technique impeccable, three strokes and a breath before catapulting off of the other wall again. He can’t help but be impressed; it’s like Louis was born to live in the water.

Louis wins handily, but Harry soon learns it’s only one heat and the final will happen once it’s been narrowed down to four. It seems to take forever, and Harry doesn’t really care, so he takes out _Othello_ and keeps reading.

_“It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul,—_

_Let me not name it to you, you chaste stars!—_

_It is the cause. Yet I’ll not shed her blood;_

_Nor scar that whiter skin of hers than snow,_

_And smooth as monumental alabaster._

_Yet she must die, else she’ll betray more men._

_Put out the light, and then put out the light:_

_If I quench thee, thou flaming minister,_

_I can again thy former light restore,_

_Should I repent me: but once put out thy light,_

_Thou cunning’st pattern of excelling nature,_

_I know not where is that Promethean heat_

_That can thy light relume. When I have pluck’d the_

_rose,_

_I cannot give it vital growth again._

_It must needs wither: I’ll smell it on the tree._

_Ah balmy breath, that dost almost persuade_

_Justice to break her sword! One more, one more._

_Be thus when thou art dead, and I will kill thee,_

_And love thee after. One more, and this the last:_

_So sweet was ne’er so fatal. I must weep,_

_But they are cruel tears: this sorrow’s heavenly;_

_It strikes where it doth love. She wakes.”_

And then it’s the finals and there’s Louis and oh God Harry actually can’t breathe he’s so nervous and they’re getting ready to go and then the shot is fired and they’re off and Harry is actually cheering as Louis slowly begins to pull ahead, moving one, then two, then three, then four strokes ahead of the other guys until he’s won the lead and he touches the edge of the pool and everybody, including Harry, goes absolutely nuts.

Then Louis is climbing out of the pool and everyone’s cheering had he’s calling for somebody and he looks for Eleanor but she’s not there and then everyone’s staring and yelling at Harry and he’s so confused and then he realizes Louis is asking for him.

He pads down the bleachers, reaching Louis so quickly and he’s soaking wet and Harry doesn’t care it’s just weird to have Louis pull him in for a hug and he’s not expecting it but he laughs and so does Louis and then they remember that things are supposed to be awkward between them.

“Look I’m sorry,” Harry starts, but Louis cuts him off.

“You never heard what I was going to say before you kicked me out,” he says. Harry looks confused. Louis cups his face in his hands.

“I like you too,” he says, and then he’s kissing Harry and the waves are crashing up upon the sand and nothing makes sense and everything makes sense and they didn’t just get here and how long has this been and now people can see Harry and Louis sees Harry and Harry sees Louis and there is bliss.

* * * * *

_Just as the moon pulls on the water to create tides, so Desdemona pulls on Othello throughout Shakespeare’s play. She is the influence that guides his action, a celestial being that controls every facet of his life with no intention of ever letting go of his—_

“Are you done yet?”

Harry looks over from his desk to see Louis tossing a soccer ball up in the air again and again, clearly bored out of his mind. “I can’t believe you didn’t finish this already.”

Harry rolls his eyes. “Well, you had me a little busy.” He’s happy, really happy, now that he knows. He knows that Mr. Paul set that whole thing up because he knew Harry and he knew Louis and knew there was something and it had to happen and it was brilliant and perfect and just amazing in every way.

“C’mon, Hazza, finish up, I’m hungry,” Louis yells. Harry rolls his eyes and throws a pillow over at him, yelling at him to toss off so he can just finish already.

_Nowhere better does Shakespeare explain the true beauty of the relationship between Othello and Desdemona than in Othello’s Act V Scene II speech where he calls his wife “the very error of the moon”. Even though he may not be perfect, she is this force who forever and always will be one with him. Each cannot survive without the other. They share light and space and control the forces of this world and everything about them speaks love._

Harry looks over at Louis and smiles.

Everything about them speaks love.

**Author's Note:**

> just a little oneshot for this week. hope you guys liked it, i had fun writing it! 
> 
> please leave comments and kudos
> 
> they set my heart on fire in a good way <3
> 
> if you like this, please read my other work called "don't follow me to where i'll go" by just clicking on my name!!! i appreciate it so much!!


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